Welcome to REID’S READER, a site renewed weekly and devoted to the appreciation and discussion of books old and new by bibliophile, critic and reviewer Nicholas Reid. Each week REID’S READER offers Something New, Something Old and Something Thoughtful to readers and browsers. REID’S READER will sometimes feature guest reviewers and will sometimes offer general book news, but it does not run publishers’ publicity material.
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Monday, March 21, 2016

Something Old

Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“THE
FOUR GEORGES” by William Makepeace Thackeray (first delivered as lectures 1855-56,
and published in book form 1861)

As I have
remarked before on this blog (see the post on The Newcomes), I have never delved as deeply into the works of
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63) as I could have, given that most of his
works are within easy reach in my study. I have read three of his four
best-known novels (Vanity Fair, Henry Esmond and The Newcomes) but have never been able to crack the fourth (Pendennis). The Virginians, Catherine
and The Adventures of Philip sit
unread on my shelves, though I did enjoy reading the bustling Barry Lyndon (very different in many
ways from the solemn film Stanley Kubrickmade of it) and a number of times read his children’s book The Rose and the Ring to my own children
when they were younger. So my acquaintance with Thackeray’s “important” stuff
is patchy. On the other hand, treated as bedside books to be nibbled at before
sleep, I have often enjoyed dipping into his essays and occasional pieces – The Yellowplush Papers, The Roundabout Papers, The Book of Snobs and Sketches and Travels in London. It has
sometimes been claimed that Thackeray was more naturally an essayist rather
than a novelist, and this argument could be sustained were it not for the fact
that his best novels really are great novels.

It
was in this bedside-book, dipping fashion that I first read and enjoyed
Thackeray’s The Four Georges, a slim
volume barely one hundred pages long in the small-print Smith and Elder reprint
of 1888 which I possess.

A little
background – Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde were not the only Victorians to
hit the lucrative American lecture circuit when they felt the need for funds.
Thackeray twice took the same path. In the early 1850s he went to the United
States and gave lectures on The English
Humourists of the Eighteenth Century. He returned in 1855-56 and gave his
lectures on The Four Georges. When
his four lectures were published in book form in 1861 (together with The English Humourists), they had the
subtitle “Sketches of Manners, Morals, Court and Town Life”. Fair enough too,
for these four lectures on England’s eighteenth and early nineteenth century
Hanoverian monarchs tell us very little about weighty political matters,
foreign affairs, wars and so forth in the reigns of Georges I, II, III and IV.
Instead, they concentrate on personal gossip, rivalries at court and among the
ruling classes, and amusing anecdotes.

Two sniffy litterateurs
of long ago, Edith Batho and Bonamy Dobree, in The Victorians volume of their Introduction
to English Literature, describe The
Four Georges as “thoroughly bad”
and say it has “been more responsible
than any other work for disseminating false views of the early Hanoverian monarchs”.

“Poo to them,” I say, as I plunge in once
more to Thackeray’s garrulous chitter-chatter.

What is it that
Thackeray tells us of these four monarchs?

That
George I was a carpet-bagging German, who was received and accepted as King of
England only by craven toadies who would have as readily supported the usurped
Stuarts if the wind had been blowing differently.

That George II
was a choleric bully with a filthy temper allied to a peculiarly German sort of
sentimentality. Thackeray happily recounts the story of George II’s wife, on
her death-bed, begging the king to re-marry when she was gone, and the king,
with tears in his eyes, replying “Non,
non – j’aurai des maitresses.” It is in the George II lecture that Thackeray
also remarks on the fact that George II thought England far less important as a
realm than his native Hanover. Says Thackeray: “The King’s fondness for Hanover occasioned all sorts of rough jokes
among his English subjects, to whom Sauerkraut and Sausages have ever been
ridiculous objects. When our present Prince Consort [he means Queen Victoria’s
German husband Prince Albert] came among
us, the people bawled out songs in the streets, indicative of the absurdity of
Germany in general. The sausage shops produced enormous sausages which we might
suppose were the daily food and delight of German Princes.”

That George III,
though insane for some of his reign, was at least pious and kindly in his lucid
intervals and did try to rein in some of his more overbearing aristocrats.

But that the
Prince Regent – later George IV – was a pampered, lecherous, foolish,
dishonourable sot.

These four
affable, easy-going, anecdotal chats are the epitome of the Whig outlook.
Thackeray regards all four Georges with easy superiority. They are, in his
view, very inferior to the really great personages of their age. But at least,
runs the subtext, these four buffoons were preferable to active and industrious
tyrants for, as seen by Thackeray, kings should at best be regarded as
ceremonial conveniences for the industrious middle-classes who are the people
who really run the country.

Chuckling along
with Thackeray’s contempt, I found two notable features in these lectures.
First, the Victorian clubman Thackeray hankers for, and has a great fondness
for, the club-world of the previous century, with all his admiring references
to “Dick Steele” and Samuel Johnson and other such clubbable chaps. Second, it
is the Prince Regent who earns his greatest contempt. Thackeray has great fun
ridiculing the notion of “the First Gentleman of Europe” by showing what a
bounder Beau Brummell’s “fat friend” was, but even more by suggesting that the
Prince Regent’s years of power supplied far worthier genuine “gentlemen” that
the royal one. Thackeray nominates Sir Walter Scott, Robert Southey (Lord knows
why!) and of course George Washington. His praise of the last-named reminds us
that he was addressing an American audience and, as all touring British
lecturers do in the USA, was buttering them up big time. After all, what would
a nineteenth-century Yankee enjoy more than a witty Englishman telling them how
fatuous British kings were?

There are some
unexpected elements in Thackeray’s outlook. Unlike Dickens, Thackeray himself
maintained more of the roistering Regency outlook than the Victorian moralism
that succeeded it (and which Dickens in part created). Nevertheless, even as he
notes the decline in boxing and in card-playing, Thackeray brings quite a bit
of his own moralism to bear in depicting the Prince Regent. Also, though in his
other works generally negative or satirical towards Catholics, Thackeray joins
Dickens in regarding Catholic Emancipation (in 1829) as a “good thing”.

In his text I
find two palpable hits, both in the lecture on George IV.

Knowing that, in
purely legitimist terms, the “Brunswicks” (Hanoverians) had usurped the English
throne, which rightly belonged to the Stuarts, there were legitimist Jacobites
who still supported the Stuarts. Yet as Thackeray correctly notes:

“The Brunswicks had no such defenders as
those two Jacobite commoners, old Sam Johnson, the Lichfield chapman’s son, and
Walter Scott, the Edinburgh lawyer’s.”

Quite so. The
Tory Johnson was a bitter foe of the Whig ascendancy, and Walter Scott’s novels
romanticised the pre-Hanoverian, pre-bourgeois past. Yet both writers supported
royalism and established royalty and in effect, willy-nilly, legitimised the Hanoverian
usurpers in the popular imagination.

Then there is
one of Thackeray’s cracks against the sybaritic Prince Regent:

“Where my Prince did actually
distinguish himself was in driving. He drove once in four hours and a half from
Brighton to Carlton House – 56 miles. All the young men of that day were fond
of that sport. But the fashion of rapid driving deserted England; and, I
believe, trotted over to America.”

Yes indeed. The
fat regent, whipping his horses along, was the precursor of petrolheads and
nitwits heading down the highway looking for adventure, even if he relied on
literal horsepower over unsealed dirt roads. That lust for speed was already an
American lust by the mid-nineteenth century (see the closing remarks on my post
concerning Nathaniel Hawthorne’s TheHouse of the Seven Gables).

As I said, The Four Georges is very pleasant
bedside reading, no more nor less. You didn’t think I was touting great
literature this week, did you?